Riverside Amusement Park is my other LEGO hobby. It’s a functional amusement park with rides that operate using custom made pushbuttons. It’s really popular with the kids and adults. I average 5 to 9 displays annually where I take the park.

As obvious as it is, I haven’t updated in a few weeks. So the question is why? A valid question. So here’s an answer. When I went on my hiatus, my Father was just put in to the hospital for what was supposed to be a short stay while treating his lungs. He never came home. I was devestated. I lost interest in making comics. Other life things happened and I just couldn’t do anything anymore. Depression. Whooo! Being that I’m a LEGO fan for more than just comicking, I focused on that. I belong to a LEGO Users Group called CoWLUG and it got me out of the house, I’m no longer socially awkward around people, don’t mind being around them either. But comicking is on the back burner. My LEGO collection has quadrupled, one of my depression signs is spending money on things just to have them. So LEGO it was. I don’t have access to my studio because of this, to much shit piled on it.

I do want to make more comics, It’s just not easy getting thoughts from brain, to completion. I have continued plotting stories and don’t worry about ideas, just getting the desire to script is the hard part.

One of these days, I will make more comics. I don’t know when. I have worked on redoing the first few years by getting them formatted and color corrected, oh and spelling errors taken care of. So I might re-run the comics from the begining, including the non-PC ones.

When I started out making brick comics, I had very little knowledge of lighting. As many of us brickcomickers know, lighting can be the bane of making comics. Over the years I’ve gained the knowledge to take good pics. One of the projects I’m working on is taking the first 850 comics and reformatting them to current standards. I’m also going to print them, so I need to have the full page comics done to them. Not as easy as it should be, 1st 70ish were all made using Photoshop. After that I use illustrator, it creates smaller original files, better text handling, and vectors just print better. The samples I’ve printed so far are awesome. I needed to color correct many, many, many, many, many, pics. The method used is the same one as the tutorial I have posted on this sight. I use a Photoshop action to make it automated.

When making comics, sometimes the light isn’t perfect but the picture is what I like and will accept it. When I open it up in Photoshop, the pic will be a bit yellow and will need to be corrected to get it back to the proper color. I use Photoshop CS2 and a Mac so things may look a bit different than what you have. I’ve recently used this method to correct over 500 pictures from the first 800 Dreamers Ink comics. This is also why you keep original pictures or a copy untouched. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

It was a lovely show up in Estes Park. The trip up the canyons were quite distracting after last summer’s flooding. CoWLUG put together a pretty cool display featuring a western section with a Spanish style village, a wooden fort, Bents Fort from Southern Colorado, an Indian village with casino, ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

The Longmont Museum and Cultural Center, which is in my hometown is holding a summer long exhibit called “BUILD! The Amazing World of LEGO”. On August 3rd and 4th CoWLUG was asked to do a train display. So we did. They thought we would do a small layout with a track and some buildings. For the full article, pictures, and videos, Take a ride here.

Along with my LEGO addiction, I also dabble in model rockets. Not the big fancy ones, but the little hobby kind by Estes. I’ve been playing with them for 25 years. I still have many of my originals. So on July 25th, 2013 I heald a Model Rocket Fun Day! A huge crowd came, only me. It was the ammount I expected. Really. Over 50 invites were sent out too. Really. So I took my Mercury Redstone rocket and put a video camera on it. It’s the same camera used to film the Estes Park train show. It’s light and pretty darn good for $40. It’s similar to a GoPro camera.

February 16th and 17th at the Estes Park Convention Center was where the 2013 Rails on The Rockies held. The Colorado/Wyoming LEGO Users Group joined in the fun for the 3rd year. Over a dozen club members participated in the layout designed by Lester. There were three sections, City, Space, and Hoth Battle. Four trains were running at one time and a monorail covered the space area. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…